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Abstract: Relationship between economic status of women and health
How does the U.S. average income compare to the average in other countries? How do women’s incomes compare with men’s? What is the relationship between income levels and health? Today, over 1.2 billion people live on less than one dollar a day. The majority of the world's absolute poor are female. In the past decade, the number of women living in poverty has increased disproportionately to the number of men, particularly in the developing countries. Poverty is particularly destructive of women's health, especially their reproductive and sexual health: of all the health statistics monitored by the World Health Organization, the largest discrepancy between the developed and developing countries is in maternal mortality. Learn more about income and poverty from the United Nations Development Programme’s 1999 Human Development Report at http://www.undp.org/hdro/kit.html. Also see the United Nations Population Fund’s (UNFPA) summary of women and poverty at http://www.unfpa.org/modules/intercenter/beijing/poverty.htm.